A speck of the history

On this day in 1959, physicist Richard Feynman gave his lecture "There's plenty of room at the bottom" in which he speculated that in the future it would be possible to directly manipulate individual atoms. Although the lecture, held at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, didn't make much impact at the time, it did do so in the 1990s, when the newly created field of nanotechnology was trying to develop a "history" of its development.

Feynman, who spelled out his thinking on the difficulties and opportunities awaiting researchers on the nanoscale with his usual clarity, issued two challenges in his talk in which he promised to pay $1000 to the first researchers who could do the following: Construct a tiny motor (won by William McLellan in 1960 using traditional machinery) and secondly, reduce the size of letters to fit the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin. This latter challenge was finally won by Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, in 1985 when he successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities.

The talk's popularity (in terms of citations) rose in the 1990s when researchers and politicians looked to fund nanotechnology and needed a high profile figure to attach to the field. Feynman's talk was re-assessed and like many of the speculations the physicist was interested in, turned out to be fairly prophetic.